SoP 2025: Accelerating Order
Issue #6: The Summer of Protocols 2025 program
In this issue: Overview of the Summer of Protocols 2025 program, curriculum development grants for faculty, scene-making with science fiction, distributed AI x blockchains technical foundations workshop in Thailand in April, momentum-maintenance protocols, “accelerating order” program philosophy, bootstrapped world logics, and opportunities to participate.
We are about to lurch and stumble comically into the third year of the Summer of Protocols program, as we continue our efforts to bootstrap a whole new intellectual tradition, cultural scene, and worldly praxis around protocols. At least that’s what it feels like on the inside — like we’re muddling through, figuring things out as we go along. We hope, from the outside, we look like the heralds of an unstoppable and inexorable but deeply benevolent force that is rapidly taking over the world and making it better. The forces of chaos and disorder can run from protocolization, but they cannot hide. Resistance is futile.
This year, we hope to demonstrate through our program that protocolization can be a creative protean force rather than a deadening bureaucratic one, capable of moving in fast and fluid ways, while healing rather than breaking things. A force that can harness the creative aspects of chaos, while containing and regulating its destructive aspects.
Our philosophical theme for the year is accelerating order, understood as an imperative to enact and induce a creative new logic for the world through protocols. More on that in the philosophical coda to this issue, but first, an overview of our 2025 program.
In the first year (2023) of the program, we focused on foundational research on protocols, with an emphasis on social science and humanities aspects. In the second year (2024), we focused on applied research on improving real-world protocols, and on the inception of protocol lore and literacy. You can find the fruits of our two years of laboring on our main research page, as well as in our Protocol Reader ebook, and our Protocol Town Hall salons and symposia. We encourage you to browse this rich and growing archive of materials if you’re interested in participating in the opportunities we have for you this year.
For 2025, our program is designed around 3 tracks expressly designed to leverage the work of previous years:
Protocol education through a Curriculum Development Program that will offer grants to faculty interested in teaching protocols, and a limited number of pro bono corporate workshops by program staff.
Scene-making, through protocol fiction and popular nonfiction, via this magazine, as well as affiliated writing meetups, workshops, and study groups.
Technical foundations, through a track of workshops, starting with one in Bangkok, April 21-25.
There are funding and participation opportunities around all three tracks (scroll to the end for a consolidated list if you’re impatient). We will of course also take advantage of any serendipitous opportunities, especially through aligned partnerships.
We will be conducting a Kickoff Town Hall for the 2025 program on Friday March 21, 9 AM Pacific Time (4 PM UTC). Please RSVP here and join us. It will be your single best opportunity to learn about the 2025 program.
For this program design to work, we will need to find ways to reach the right people, who we think are mostly beyond our current network. So we would really appreciate it if you could forward this program overview and its various calls for participation to the right people and places.
Besides these three planned tracks, we will continue to support the focal areas of previous years, through our momentum maintenance protocols. These include our alumni program and online salons track (which will kick off with a talk by Peter Wang this year, on March 26, on “AI as the Anti-Product”).
We are actively seeking partners to help shape and drive the agenda this year, so if your organization wants to join the protocolization revolution, get in touch! You can email us at research@summerofprotocols.com, or DM us on Substack.
Let’s dive into what we have in store for you in 2025.
Protocol Education
The core of this year’s roadmap is the Curriculum Development Program, aimed at college-level faculty, as well as online educators, to develop and teach courses, or modules of existing courses, about protocols.
We will be offering summer grants totaling $500,000 for educators interested in developing full courses on protocols, or course modules/short courses. We aim to fund approximately 5-7 of the former, and 10-15 of the latter. Grants will be made on an individualized basis.
Specially earmarked grants for developing courses in Chinese, or from a Chinese perspective, will be available, sponsored by GCC (Global Chinese Community), an organization with which we had a very successful partnership last year.
We will also be accepting applicants sponsored by their home institutions or other funding sources. We strongly encourage potential applicants to explore such funding, so we can maximize participation. We will be capping the program at around 30-35 participants.
The Curriculum Development Program will kick off with a week-long in-person workshop in late May at Edge Esmeralda, followed by a summer-long virtual program built around weekly online interactions and collaborative sessions.
We hope to end the summer with a rich repository of teaching materials, and a few courses and course modules cued-up for teaching in Fall. If you’re an educator at a traditional institution, or an online course creator with an established track record, consider applying.
Full details of the Curriculum Development Program can be found here. Applications are due April 1.
Besides this core track, we also hope to conduct a few short workshops with corporate partners, focused on introducing protocol thinking into business environments. We believe the emerging discipline of protocols is going to transform management and organizational development practices, especially when combined with AI technologies.
If you think your business has what it takes to be a leader in its industry, capable of developing and deploying this potent new secret sauce, we want to hear from you. We will be happy to try and “protocol-pill” your company or organization through a short seminar or half-day workshop, pro bono. You organize and supply pizza, we supply part of the programming and show up to help you run it, either in-person or virtually.
We have allocated team bandwidth and a modest travel budget to support 4-6 such workshops this year. Offer open while supplies last.
We did our first such seminar last month, at a major insurance company, and it was both thought-provoking and fun.
We welcome enquiries from companies in any domain rich in codified protocols of any sort, but some sectors of particular interest to us include insurance, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, manufacturing, energy, mining, and logistics.
Reach out via Substack DMs, or email us at research@summerofprotocols.com.
Scene-Making
Throughout the program so far, we’ve drawn inspiration from the fertile techno-cultural scenes that have surrounded every consequential technological revolution in the last century. The Protocolized newsletter is the main vehicle for our own scene-making efforts around protocols.
We particularly want to catalyze a new sub-genre of science fiction we’re calling protocol fiction, along with associated kinds of popular non-fiction. You can read more about this mission in our inaugural issue, Strange New Rules, and find details on how to write with us here.
Besides soliciting fiction and non-fiction submissions, we will also be running a few contests through the year, around specific creative provocations. If you’re a science fiction writer looking for a challenge, you should subscribe to this newsletter to be notified.
The first of our contests is already cued up: the Terminological Twists challenge.
The Terminological Twists challenge: Take a well-known technical term with protocolish connotations (such as consensus, packet switching, cap-and-trade or chain of custody) and write a short story that explores some unexpected and startling implication of the concept. We encourage you to make creative use of LLMs to compose your story (in which case we ask that you document and submit your “writing with AI” protocol along with your entry).
Top ten finalists will be eligible for publishing in Protocolized, and the top three stories will win $2500, $1500 and $1000 respectively.
Entries due by April 15. Contest details can be found here.
We are also organizing meetups and short workshops around protocol fiction, and particularly emphasizing the creative use of LLMs in creating protocol fiction. Two such workshops have already been conducted in Austin in the last month, and we want to see many more happen around the world.
If you’re interested in organizing such a workshop, get in touch.
We’ll supply some ideas and mentorship based on our pilot workshops, and also sponsor pizza! If any program alumni happen to live near your venue, or happen to be passing through, we’ll try and get them to participate in person.
Technical Foundations
Through the first two years of the program, we primarily investigated protocols with artistic, qualitative, empirical, and hacker approaches. Even though we kept catching tantalizing glimpses of potential for formalization and mathematization, we resisted the temptation, since we believed we were not yet ready.
Now we believe we are ready. We know enough about the phenomenology of protocols that we can begin theorizing in more formal ways. We can begin working towards broad, general frameworks that apply across domains, and lend themselves to mathematization and perhaps even axiomatization, while being useful in practical settings. To pursue this vision, we want to kick off a technical foundations track, drawing inspiration from the history of economics.
It took approximately a century — from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) to Léon Walras’s Éléments d'économie politique pure (1874), which introduced the notion of a general equilibrium — for the discipline of economics to begin acquiring a scaffolding of useful formalization. It took another 70 years before a recognizably modern formalization — Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944) — became broadly available.
A similar trajectory, we believe, needs to be traversed for protocols, but we think we can perhaps speed-run it if we get started in creative ways. Could we perhaps get to a similar level of paradigm maturity in 17 years rather than 170? Maybe with some help from AI?
This is a formidable intellectual challenge. Theorizing such widely disparate things as AI models, computer networks, blockchains, climate change agreements, and healthcare delivery, all within a single elegant paradigm, will require uncovering a vast number of general patterns, seeking elegant unifications, and striking a fine balance between theoretical elegance and practical applicability.
Older disciplines, such as cybernetics/systems theory, and complex network science, have attempted to tackle some aspects of what we’re after, but we believe there’s a truly novel paradigm out there, with different foundational ideas, waiting to be uncovered and systematized.
The evolution of economics as a field feels particularly relevant as a precedent, since it is a field that impacts the world as “an engine, not a camera,” as Donald Mackenzie has pointed out. Theories of economics do not describe the world of commerce so much as conjure it into being in particular institutionalized forms. Forms that evolve with the theories themselves.
Protocols, we believe, are also engines rather than cameras. Today, while they are ubiquitous across the planet, they exist in a pre-theoretical state, like premodern economies. In the future, we believe powerful theories of protocols will induce new world logics on our planet that animate it in powerful new ways.
This year, we aim to start looking for such theories through a track of workshops. The first such workshop, the Khlongs and Subaks workshop on the intersection of open distributed AI and blockchains, will be held at CMKL university in Bangkok, April 21-25.
We aim to explore the intersection of these two powerful technologies from technical, cultural, and public policy perspectives, in search of general principles and opportunities for formalization. And we hope to do so drawing inspiration from the region’s historic rice-farming traditions and protocols. Khlongs are irrigation/communication canals in Thai, while Subaks are community organizations related to rice-farming.
Why start in Southeast Asia? Our exploratory activities in the region last year convinced us that it is poised for an intellectual renaissance of exactly the sort that a foundational exploration of protocols needs. It is also a region that has a peculiar genius for rapidly developing and deploying powerful new kinds of state capacity. The region features the sort of natural environment – comprising ten diverse nations across a highly diverse archipelagic and coastal-continental topography straddling critical global trade routes – that is ideal for thinking about protocols. Decentralized modes of organization are the default in Southeast Asia, rather than the exception. So there is no better place to start the search for technical foundations.
We are deliberately choosing to look for broad, abstract, and universal technical foundations in very specific, grounded, and situated places. Just as for Adam Smith, a pin factory provided the inspiration for formulating broad and general theories of economics, we believe going deep on specific, grounded and situated protocol domains is the way to start thinking more broadly about protocols.
In Fall, we hope to build on this phenomenologically grounded approach by conducting a Basket of Protocols workshop (likely in North America or Europe), inspired by the idea of a “basket of goods” in economic theories of inflation. We will invite a group of researchers to explore candidate formalisms and paradigms capable of expressing the phenomenology of a basket of selected protocols in a unified way. This workshop is currently under development, and we’re actively looking for a host institution to partner with.
If you have ideas and thoughts, or might be interested in participating, or if your institution might be interested in hosting, please get in touch.
Momentum Maintenance Protocols
Finally, as we pursue all these exciting new activities, we want to make sure we don’t drop the ball on activities we have already catalyzed.
We will continue supporting foundational explorations, applied research, and lore-and-literacy inception efforts, both by program alumni, and by friends and supporters of the program.
The three main ways we will be doing this are:
Alumni program: Inviting alumni to participate in 2025 events and programs. If you are an alumnus of any previous SoP activity and are interested in participating in one of the 2025 activities, let us know and we’ll try to make it happen. As in 2024, we have some travel budget earmarked for this.
Online salons: We will kick off this year’s Protocol Town Hall program on March 26 with Peter Wang, founder of the well-known Python IDE, Anaconda, and currently leading its AI program. He will speak on “AI as an anti-product.” We have a great calendar of talks taking shape – Jon Askonas, Emmett Shear, and Sreeram Kannan are cued up to speak in April.
Protocolized Magazine: While the main focus of this magazine is to catalyze a new genre of science fiction, an important secondary role is to provide a publication venue for protocol researchers, both alumni and external to the program. If you have an essay idea that might suit a broad audience, pitch us!
Institutional Partnerships: In 2024, we had a few small-scale collaborations with other organizations, and this year, we hope to do more. If your organization wants to collaborate with the Summer of Protocols program in any way, do reach out.
Besides these activities, we are always looking for ways to keep investing in our existing successful activities, so if you have ideas or suggestions, or better yet, a proposal for investing yourself in some way, get in touch!
Go Big and Go Home!
The 2025 program is framed by a particular tension – between “going big” and “going home” Ours is a small, heavily improvised program trying to have a big impact.
One way to try and do this is to go big. We could try expanding this program in future years in traditional ways, seeking more funding, bringing on more staff, and funding an ever-expanding portfolio of research activities and events.
But we don’t want to do that. We do not believe that creating a large and indefinitely perpetuated institution is the right answer here.
Another way would be to go home, which for this program would mean declaring this program a success and a job well done, and retreating to the narrower concerns and priorities of the Ethereum ecosystem.
We don’t want to do that either. We do not believe the work here is done, or can get done with any sort of limited and unambitious effort.
How do you go big and go home at the same time? Can we somehow catalyze an open network of overlapping and entangled activities at multiple loci, all trying to “bootstrap a whole new intellectual tradition, cultural scene, and worldly praxis around protocols”?
We think we can. In fact a large number of actors loosely bound by a shared mission is the only way this kind of thing can happen. And protocols themselves offer modes of organization for this. We will be exploring a variety of organizational mechanisms pioneered by the Ethereum ecosystem, such as retroactive public goods funding (RPGF), split-contract guilds, DAOs, and pop-up cities, to figure out how to go big and go home.
This is how we bootstrap an actual new world, built on solid foundations, into existence. Unlike memeing things into existence, true bootstrapping takes invention, organization, and steady effort. And perhaps most importantly, eating our own dogfood.
But that does not mean the impact has to unfold slowly and incrementally. In fact, it cannot afford to.
Bootstrapping New World Logics
Returning to our theme for the year, accelerating order, what does that mean? At first glance, there seems to be an inherent contradiction to the idea. As we observed in the Introduction to the Protocol Reader:
Slow-but-inexorable is the main “tell” of protocol technologies. In his 2013 New Yorker essay, “Slow Ideas,” physician Atul Gawande noted that simple but powerful ideas in healthcare, such as the use of disinfectants and handwashing, spread characteristically slowly, often taking decades or even a century or more to fully spread across the world…
…Though they arrive slowly, protocols typically install themselves in extraordinarily persistent ways, often turning into seemingly immortal and unconscious parts of our built environment.
The idea of “rapid protocolization” feels like a contradiction in terms, and should. The idea that we could go from the disorder and chaos of a “move fast and break things” regime to an orderly regime equipped with the right constraints to drive sustained creativity and flourishing, without losing momentum, feels almost fraudulent, like stealing a free lunch from nature.
There seems to be an almost religious force of necessity to the idea that the natural antithesis of move fast and break things is move slowly and fix things.
Yet, history proves this is not true. Great infrastructure leaps — in areas like sanitation, healthcare, and air quality — can happen remarkably fast. You can move fast and fix things. Or move fast and heal things.
Leaps of protocolization perhaps cannot unfold as fast as vandalism and destruction, but they can unfold much faster than we think. What takes time is getting to completeness and universality. Scaling to consequentiality or even dominance can happen rapidly. Thoroughness takes time.
As the joke goes, the first 90% takes 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
The process of thorough human adaptation to new world logics necessarily takes time, as it should. Complex new systems of the world should not be carelessly thrown together in totalizing ways. But that does not mean emergence processes must unfold entirely incrementally, at an unchanging snail’s pace. In fact, they cannot hope to succeed at all that way.
In order to survive at all, new world logics must attempt to grow and develop as fast as possible early on, like young biological organisms or startups.
This does not mean chaos is necessary along the way, or that creative evolution for some mystical reason requires anarchy and chaos. In fact, the reverse may be true: As the US Navy Seals slogan goes, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Sometimes (not always!) chaos is merely the experience of being on the wrong side of a powerful but formidably disciplined creative process.
We often think of the forces of disorder and chaos as acting much more rapidly than those of order and method. While this is generally true, new logics of order can gain a foothold and spread rapidly too. Additionally, they can do something chaos usually cannot — sustain the slower, steadier pace until the world is irreversibly transformed. Powerful new world logics, unlike chaos, can not only gain ground, they can hold it.
Think of crystallization processes, or a powerful network effect driving adoption of an elegant new standard, or a vaccination protocol racing to overtake and drive back an infectious contagion. The forces of creative order can compete and win against the forces of chaos and disorder. The catch is that they must combine order and creativity and aim to establish a new kind of creative order, not just install arbitrary bureaucratic complexity, or mindlessly coercive drives towards “productivity” or “efficiency” for their own sake.
As legendary Intel CEO Andy Grove famously remarked, first let chaos reign, then rein in the chaos. This dictum does not mean slowing down, losing momentum, or allowing the capture of Promethean processes by either deadening bureaucratic forces (as ironically happened to Intel itself) or forces of wanton destruction and extraction.
It means capacity for governance getting sophisticated and expressive enough to harness newly unleashed energies in the world in the most powerful ways. It means going from move fast and break things, to move fast while healing things.
Our theme this year is accelerating order. We will be looking for ways to move fast and heal things.
We believe we can spark an accelerating order on a global scale with protocols, inducing a variety of new world logics. An example of a new world logic potentially capable of accelerating order is what Vitalik Buterin has been calling d/acc where the d stands for decentralized, or defensive, and acc of course stands for acceleration.
But d/acc is not the only possible world logic that credibly proposes ways to move fast while healing things. Other such logics are possible, and protocolization, at its heart, is a planet-scale pluralist process where new move-fast-and-heal-things world logics compete and cooperate to establish powerful new equilibria.
We tend to associate the word order with slow-moving bureaucratic processes, or ominous “law and order” dogwhistles hinting at unaccountable militarized police states. But in the world of protocols, order is simply the elemental evolutionary force that transmutes chaotic energies that periodically irrupt into our world into the sustained creative drives that we experience as extended epochs of progress and flourishing. To accelerate order is to get to such epochs of progress.
In 2025, we think the world is ready and hungry for the next such period of progress and flourishing. Which means a certain sense of urgency is called for in the evolution of this program. Not a panicked, emergency mode of urgency, but a mode of creative urgency, driven by imaginative new world logics capable of accelerating order.
Over two years, we have convinced ourselves, and a significant and growing group of thoughtful people, that the fledgling discipline of protocols is critically important for addressing the current challenges and opportunities of the world. These challenges and opportunities — AI, climate change, wars over state capacity in many countries, the unraveling of the rules-based international order — aren’t politely standing still waiting for us to bring our ideas, methods, and technological capabilities to bear; we have to move at the pace of the challenges and opportunities.
We have to move fast and heal things.
Who is we you might ask? Well, believers in the immense potential of protocols of course! We hope you count yourselves among them, whatever your particular priorities and political inclinations.
Unbridled chaotic energies — good, bad, and neutral — are on the rise. But order is poised to accelerate too, in the form of modern protocol technologies. Accelerate to contain, tame, regulate, and harness, while protecting vital creative processes.
There are, of course, those who disagree. Those who believe that unbridled chaotic energies either cannot, or should not, be reined in in any way. The various flavors of unqualified accelerationist philosophies typically adopt such a view.
We believe they are wrong. Without protocolization to tame and harness chaotic energies, we can only expect an anticlimactic meltdown. A future that begins with a bang and ends with a whimper.
There are also those who believe that no new world logics are necessary. That we only need to look to history for answers. To various supposed twentieth century bureaucratic utopias or nineteenth century Great Games and Great Power competition.
We believe these ideas are wrong too. Our world has gotten far too technologically complex to be governed by reactionary world logics. If flooring the accelerator is not the answer, neither is reflexively slamming on whatever brakes still work, or frantically trying to rewind to an unworkable past state.
What the global moment calls for is neither accelerators, nor brakes, but steering technologies. Genuinely new world logics that are sufficiently fluid and expressive to harness the explosive new promethean accelerationist energies being unleashed today. World logics based on fundamentally new principles and ideas that comprehend the chaos well enough to allow us to govern and steer.
In this program, we obviously believe protocols, in particular decentralized ones based on cryptographic technologies (including, but not limited to, blockchains) are a big part of creating such world logics. The question is: How do we imagine them and inject them into the world?
In 2025, we aim to start figuring that out, before it’s too late.
The time for accelerating order is now. The clock is ticking.
We hope one or more elements of our planned program of activities — education, scene-making, technical foundations — excites your imagination, and inspires you to join us. We hope you’ll take advantage of one or more of the opportunities for participation.
Here’s to learning to move fast and heal things, and an unstoppable 2025!
List of 2025 Participation Opportunities
Khlongs and Subaks workshop (Bangkok, April 21-25): Applications due March 21
Curriculum Development Program: Applications due April 1
Terminological Twists short-story contest: Entries due April 15
Summer of Protocols at Edge Esmeralda: May 25-31
Basket of Protocols workshop, Fall 2025 (details tbd)
Email research@summerofprotocols.com for any of the following:
Corporate workshops on protocols
Institutional partnerships
Speaking in our Protocol Town Hall salon series
Inviting one of us to speak at your organization
Print publishing enquires for The Protocol Reader